Iraq

I'll give Donald Trump this: he says what others think but are too cagey to say in public. Yes, the American war in Iraq was mostly about oil, but it was so incompetently managed that the U.S. isn't getting the benefit of Iraq's increased oil production. "We spend $1.5 trillion, we lose thousands of lives, we destroy a country … but China is in there taking out all the oil, and we’re getting nothing," Trump said on Fox and Friends.

“I think it’s very nice of us, we have our Fifth Fleet over there making sure the waters are nice and calm,” Trump said. “I’ve said it a thousand times … we shouldn’t have been there, but if we’re there, take the oil. Take the oil. At least pay back, at a minimum, pay back — take the oil. Well guess what? China is taking the oil (NYT), but they didn’t have to fight.”

Read between the lines. Trump is conceding that America went into Iraq, not because of the brutality of Saddam Hussein, not to bring democracy, but because international oil companies and their allies in the Bush administration brazenly wanted Iraq's oil. Proponents of the Iraq war were willing to kill 100,000+ Iraqis for oil, essentially to keep the price of gas low in the US. President Bush and cronies claimed high-minded, humanitarian values, but Trump is saying the war was really about blood for oil.

Despite the carnage, the Iraq war succeeded in greatly increasing oil production, especially in the Kurdish region. In that sense, the war was a victory -- for the Kurds and for international oil companies. Antonia Juhasz, an American oil and energy analyst, made this case in a piece for CNN in April 2013. Highlights:

Opening up Iraq to foreign oil companies was main goal of Iraq War

Plans for Western oil exploration in Iraq were drawn up years before 2003 invasion

Bush administration pressured Iraqi government to pass law allowing foreign firms in

Chuck Hagel in 2007: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are."

And yet, in doing the bidding and laying the groundwork for ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and other large oil companies to profit in Iraq, Americans did not benefit enough from the war, Juhasz wrote. Neither did Iraqis.

Iraq's oil production has increased by more than 40% in the past five years to 3 million barrels of oil a day (still below the 1979 high of 3.5 million set by Iraq's state-owned companies), but a full 80% of this is being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs. GDP per capita has increased significantly yet remains among the lowest in the world and well below some of Iraq's other oil-rich neighbors. Basic services such as water and electricity remain luxuries, while 25% of the population lives in poverty.... Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with losers: the Iraqi people and all those who spilled and lost blood so that Big Oil could come out ahead.

An American correspondent emails me: "We erred thinking that the Iraqis would prefer freedom to Saddam. Some people are freedom-loving and some aren't...Like in WWII, we came to Iraq as liberators, not conquerors. But the Iraqis didn't get it.

My response: No, the Americans didn't get it. Many if not most Iraqis were indeed, initially, happy that Saddam was gone, but were suspicious of the motivations of the Americans. Then they watched as the Americans rushed in to guard the oil fields, fire the Baathist police force, the army, the bureaucracy, and dismiss the Baathist party which had ruled since 1963. The Baathists, for all their brutality, at least knew how things worked, had maintained order and the power grid. Without them, law and order fell apart and disorder prevailed. (See "10 Mistakes of the Iraq War," from the perspective of Col. Ted Spain.)

We sent only about 100,000 troops to Iraq. We probably needed about half a million troops to restore and maintain order, but President Bush could not rally or muster support from the American people for that strong a commitment, especially after no WMDs were found. As Iraq descended into civil war, he finally understood the need for more troops in 2006. With the troop surge, we were able to pull the Iraqis back from civil war and re-establish enough order so we didn't leave Iraq with an ignominous defeat. However, now that we've left, Iraq seems to have returned to if not large-scale civil war, small scale civil war. Not a good outcome for them, or us.

You are exactly right......I have said for years that it was dumb to disband the Iraqi army. Turns out that the idiot who was put in charge (US envoy Paul Bremer) did that without Presidential approval...Bush didn't know it happened until after it happened. Things started going wrong when Bremer told his predecessor who was working with the sheiks, etc. to form a government to thank the Arabs, but they could go home..."This is an American show."

Factually incorrect. Bremer communicated with President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staffs in advance stating that the plan was to disband the army; they acknowledged his plan and didn't object to it. Bremer's decision was rational at the time because the U.S. certainly didn't want to trust Saddam's army and Saddam's bureaucracy. This revealed how poorly thought out the whole operation was because there were few Iraqis we Americans trusted to run the country.

So, you're saying, due to America's poor planning, Iraqis saw their country dissolve into violent chaos?

Yes. Looters and criminals had free reign. Al Qaeda, which Saddam had not tolerated, saw a great opportunity, and rushed into sew more chaos. The Sunni minority, feeling displaced by Saddam's ouster and the growing political power of the Shias, organized an insurgency. Al Qaeda moved into the power vaccum to create further chaos by launching car bombs.Then as the American army was placed in charge of the country in order to restore order, the Iraqis knew it was an occupation not a liberation.

You know, Americans made mistakes in their occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II as well. But that didn't prevent the Germans and Japanese from creating what everyone now agrees were "economic miracles." It's past time for the Iraqis to stop blaming the Americans, take responsibility and pull themselves up after all the largesse we've given them.

The historical circumstances and internal dynamics of Iraq are completely different from post-war Germany and Japan. Iraq has long been hindered by factionalism and held together as a nation by totalitarianism. In the jostling for power, the Sunnis, who represent about one-fifth of the population, got more and more upset when they saw incompetent Shia whom they distrusted installed in the government to lord power over them, and Nouri Al Malaki, a Shia with connections to Iran, was picked by the American ambassador to be Prime Minister because he was perceived to be at least somewhat independent of Iran. Sunnis determined they had more freedom and privileges under Saddam, their benefactor.

The long-oppressed Shia, representing about three-fifths of the population, saw the demise of Saddam as an opportunity to create a state allying with their tribal brothers in Iran. Yet they knew the Americans wouldn't agree to that. Both Sunni and Shia saw the American occupiers as the enemy. The Sunnis, now feeling displaced and oppressed, are angry and allying with their Sunni brothers in Syria, and the Shia are angry and allying with their Shia brothers in Iran. In our ignorance of the region, we have empowered two potentially warring Islamic sects if not semi-states.

Sunni/Shia is sort of like Protestants and Catholics fighting to determine the true doctrine. But, man, they did that 500 or 600 or 1000 years ago. Where were these people in the Middle East that they didn't get the message that religion isn't worth fighting over? Peoples of the West pretty much figured that out centuries ago...

How soon you forget. Same could be said of Europe. Look at the history of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire until the end of WWII slaughter. Was it not a very bloody place because of religion and primitive tribalism for 1,500 years? It took a long time for Europe to sort out nations, boundaries and governance after the fall of the Roman Empire. It has been less than 100 years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and it will take time for the Middle East to sort out nations, boundaries and governance.

The big internal fights within Christianity did not just happen a thousand years ago. You are factually incorrect. Those fights started officially about 1000 years ago, with the Great Schism between the Western Roman Empire (Catholics) and Eastern Roman Empire (Orthodox) in 1058. It actually started well before that -- in 800,Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III, essentially dissing the Greek Orthodox Patriarch/Emperor in Constantinople.

The mutual excommunications between Catholic and Orthodox lasted until 1965.

And then there were the battles between Catholics and Protestants, after the Protestant Reformation in Europe, from 1500 to 1700. Violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants lasted until the late 1990s in Ireland.

Protestants and Catholics were fighting in Northern Ireland up until 20 years ago. European religious tensions spilled over into the early American nation, although they are largely forgotten today. It was a big deal when Protestant America elected a Catholic president in 1960. These were political power struggles more than religious struggles -- various ethnicities such as the Catholic Irish and Italians struggling for political power -- and the same is true for Sunni and Shia in the Middle East. Shia were allied with Persia or Iran, and congregated in Eastern Iraq, whereas Sunni dominated the rest of the region. The Shia faced discrimination in Iraq and the Sunni faced discrimination in Iran.

The Middle East is a bloody place because of their religion and primitive tribalism, hatred of the Jews.

You might ask yourself who has slaughtered more Jews and sent them on pograms -- the Europeans, including the Russians, or the Arabs? Let's see, six million Jews slaughtered by Europeans; a few thousand killed by Arabs, if that. And a lot more Palestianians killed by Israel than vice versa. In the last Gaza war in 2008, I believe there were about 13 Israelis killed compared to 1300 Palestinians killed.

So why haven't the Arabs learned to govern themselves without slaughtering each other?

Colonialism and foreign imperialism. The Middle East was under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire, or Turkey, for nearly 400 years. Then in the early 20th century when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the colonial powers France and Britain stepped in. Arabs wanted a unified Arab state, but France and Britain, to advance their own interests rather than respecting Arabs' rights to self-determination, insisted on carving Arab "countries" up into Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, with artificial borders to keep the tribes and sects disunited and at each other's throats so as to maintain neo-colonial power in the region.

That doesn't explain the failure of America's experiment with democracy in Iraq. We handed them democracy on a silver platter, and now they are squandering what we gave them.

Can democracy be imposed from the top down without first developing civil society and desire for self-government from the bottom up? It seems not. The Bush administration reflected a kind of neo-colonial attitude when, during the recent occupation, it "organized the new political system in Iraq on a sectarian basis," writes Adnan Pachachi, an Iraqi who initially supported the invasion, in an article titled "The Road to Failure." The Americans "had the preconceived idea that Iraqi society by its nature was divided along sectarian lines. That was a fallacy. As a result, the secular groups did not receive the recognition they deserved, and the government fell under the influence of religious and ethnic parties. Fully exploiting their built-in advantages, they established a regime that proved over the years to be incapable of governing the country."

Sure, the Americans misjudged terribly in Iraq, but give them credit for at least trying...that is what pisses me off...people who expect perfection from imperfect people. And, that was my original beef....instead of holding people up for ridicule they should be recognized as having tried to create something good only to fail.

So this is your response to a war that cost American taxpayers $767 billion and was a strategic victory for Iran?? A war in which the Inspector General has determined that at least eight billion of $60 billion spent on Iraqi reconstruction was completely wasted?? You might not take such a forgiving attitude if you read We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, by Peter Van Buren. It's an American foreign service officer's caustic account of his time in Iraq. The first chapter is available for free on Amazon.com. All you can do is laugh at the absurdity of the American mission and how ungrounded in reality it was. As an American taxpayer, you should be absolutely appalled at the waste, fraud and abuse.

The waste of resources was phenomenal -- unqualified contractors were paid $250,000 a year to go to Iraq without even being interviewed first -- former yoga instructors became "women's empowerment specialists"; $80,000 was spent to translate American classic books into Arabic, only to be dumped into garbage bins because the Iraqis had no capacity to teach or understand such books. As a taxpayer, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

I have no doubt billions were wasted and that the operation probably should not have taken place as it did. Not my argument. My argument is to give them credit for trying to do something worthwhile.

You give them credit?? Where is your outrage as a taxpayer? $767 billion was spent on an operation that wasn't just a failure of American aspirations to rid Iraq and the world of a ruthless dictator and impose democracy on Iraq. IT IS, most probably, A STRATEGIC VICTORY FOR IRAN. It isn't just a terrible misjudgment if not dishonest assessment of wmds that did not exist, in that the President and his advisors were close-minded and pressured the CIA and other agencies to tell them only what they wanted to hear. They ignored or buried intelligence from high-level sources close to Saddam that WMDs had been destroyed, and ignored former Marine and weapons inspector Scott Ritter's very public declaration that all Saddam had was "harmless goo."

They not only misled the American people, and waged a war on false pretenses. They are responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans, well over 100,000 Iraqis, and more than 700 BILLION down the drain, more than the cost of the Marshall Plan. It's an outrage.

It has been said that Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War fiasco cost liberals not only the 1968 and 1972 elections, but it cost liberals a reputation for good foreign policy judgments for a generation, specifically for 24 years. It was not until the 1992 election that they recovered from the Vietnam syndrome. Twenty-four years. The Iraq war fiasco ought to deprive neo-cons of the presidency for equally as long.

Sounds like you are looking for vengeance. Tell me....if you were a President with 3,000 people dead in your streets and the destruction of billions in property....do you think that might affect your judgment?

It might. But aren't our leaders accountable for their decisions? In Britain at least they launched an inquiry and held hearings on the mistakes in Iraq, and forced Tony Blair to defend his judgments. I daresay George W. Bush could not defend himself as well as Blair.

Yes, I think 9/11 rattled and spooked Bush and co. They panicked in a crisis, and demonstrated very poor judgment in Iraq. Shouldn't they be held to account? Or does America's leadership prefer not to look back and learn from its many mistakes?

Americans have a difficult time understanding why the rest of the world doesn't love us since we are beneficient in foreign aid and trumpet universally-recognized human rights. We say we want to spread democracy and self-determination around the world. And yet for all of this, we are called imperialists. Why, for example, are the peoples of the Middle East so suspicious of America's "good intentions"?

Why don't the Iraqis thank us for our eight years of sacrifice? We added to their pain, they say. In an article titled "Iraq's pain has only intensified since 2003," Sami Ramadani charges that for 30 years, the US supported the dictator Saddam Hussein and shored up his Baathist Party. The US gave Saddam no indication we'd oppose his annexation of Kuwait. Then after he did it, we reversed ourselves, and inflicted mostly pain on the Iraqi people for another 20 years through two wars, and "murderous sanctions." Once the US toppled Saddam, it nurtured a political process "designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord." He writes bitterly:

In opposing the 2003 war, Ramadini, a British citizen of Kurdish origin who fled Iraq after opposing Saddam, questioned whose interests would really be served by the invasion -- he suspected only certain American and British interests would be served -- and concluded war wouldn't give his people their freedom.

"In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam's party, the Ba'ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats; it backed the Ba'ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its support for Saddam in 1979…helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs..."

Ramadani's charge that the CIA was complicit in the 1963 coup of a democratically-led government of Iraq is backed up by the memoirs of CIA operatives. In fact, Wikipedia has details on secret CIA involvement in coups of democratically-led governments in 11 countries between 1949 and 1981 -- including Syria, Iran, and Turkey in the Middle East.

Syria's president in 1949 opposed an oil pipeline American business interests wanted built, so the CIA overthrew the government and installed a criminal to make sure the pipeline was built. Once the pipeline was finished, the Syrian president was allowed to return to power.

In the early 1950s, multi-national oil companies asked President Truman to have the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran because the prime minister threatened to nationalize the oil companies. Truman refused. But when President Eisenhower came to power in 1953, the oil companies asked again and got their wish. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to overthrow the Iranian government and install the shah, who was a brutal dictator for 25 years.

In America's defense, its leadership saw these coups in the context of the Cold War and the "twilight struggle with communism." Most governments around the world were forced to align with either the United States or the Soviet Union, as allies, proxies, puppets or satellites. Turkey, because of its strategic location, was especially filled with "spy vs. spy" tension. And yes, business interests, especially oil companies, exploited Cold War tensions to gain economic advantage.

Democratic development in the Middle East for centuries has been hampered by big-power politics, and the rise and fall of empires. For 500 years, the Middle East was part of the Turkish-Ottoman empire. After World War I, that empire collapsed, and the British and French stepped in to create artificial borders advantageous primarily to themselves. Their empires collapsed, and the Americans stepped in -- through foreign aid, coups, shuttle diplomacy, and the wars in Iraq -- to maintain access to cheap oil and to protect Israel and pretty much support everything Israel does.

Those have been America's two main interests in the region. We haven't cared much about human rights in the Middle East, especially for Egyptians and Palestinians, despite our professed values. With generous foreign aid, the US shored up the dictatorship of Mubarak in Egypt for nearly 30 years, effectively blocking regime change there because he supported peace with Israel. And we've put almost no pressure for an end to illegal West Bank settlements on the Israelis, despite our stated belief that's the only way a two-state solution -- and peace -- can occur.

That said, in my experience the peoples of the Middle East find much to admire about America and Americans and welcome us as individuals to their region.

In addition, former US Marine and Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ridder in 2002 waged a very public campaign to persuade American and British officials that whatever biological weapons Saddam stored from the late 1980s had turned into "harmless goo."

A U.S. Senate report concluded that American leaders discounted this evidence and "misled themselves." After 9-11, they were guilty of fear-mongering and hysterical group-think.

Intelligence officers had a "fixed mindset" that caused them to "see only evidence that supported this possibility" that Saddam had WMDs, US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer has concluded. The Bush administration chose Duelfer to him to head up the US investigation of Iraq's weapon's program. In a March, 2013 essay, Duelfer maintained "no books were cooked," but that "alternative possibilities fell by the wayside." Intelligence officers "fell victim to fabricators who told us what we expected to hear." Nevertheless, "intelligence reports should not be the only basis for making decisions, and they were not for the Bush administration."

Even if it were known that Saddam had no WMDs, a sizeable number of policy-makers favored his removal anyway. For them, wmd's were beside the main point. Remember that the desire for regime change in Iraq was a US goal since 1998, because of the belief that Saddam Hussein represented a long-term threat to his neighbors and ultimately, US and British interests.

"Imagine, for a moment, that US infantry units rolling into Baghdad in April, 2003 had found a couple of warehouses full of VX gas and mustard gas component chemicals and warheads, or a refrigerator full of botulinum toxin. That would have been enough to 'prove' the Bush administration's case for war - 'pre-empting' the threat posed by Saddam.
But would proving that Saddam's regime had some unconventional weapons capability have made the Iraq war any less of a debacle? That invading Iraq was an epic blunder is a commonly held view today in the US strategic establishment, and any discovery of stocks of WMD on Iraqi soil would not likely have altered that assessment. The problems inherent in the case for war were obvious to anyone who cared to ask the more difficult questions." -- Tony Karon, The (UAE) National newspaper, in an article titled "Media Failed to Ask Right Questions on Weapons Claims."

Why would the possession of WMDs by Saddam necessarily require war with Iraq? The question applies not only to Saddam's Iraq, but nuclear weapons in Iran, and biological weapons possibly used by Assad's forces in Syria.

In none of these cases can the governments prove they do not possess such weapons. Even giving United Nations' weapons inspectors full, free and permanent ability to search for "needles in haystacks" would not necessarily prevent a rush to war. Weapons inspectors who declared definitively that Saddam had no WMDs would not have been believed. Or if they were believed, Saddam would have been exposed as vulnerable to his enemies, foreign and domestic. He had a stake in making the case on WMDs ambivilant.

So, the continuing debate over WMDs ("Bush and Blair lied; people died") is a great over-simplification of the rationale for the Iraq war. They should not be accepted as "gospel truth," Duelfer writes. "Certainly, there were plenty of mistakes made then that should be avoided in the future. However, many of these arguments seem grounded in politics rather than reality."

Yes, the Bush administration, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war -- magnifying Saddam as an "imminent threat" because he supposedly had WMDs. Over-selling was a marketing and public relations tactic to manipulate a divided public to support war.

But it was not nearly as bad as the far more substantive blunders that were made. Americans had nearly complete lack of understanding or appreciation of Iraqi history, culture or even understanding of the Arabic language on the part of intelligence officers. The US Embassy in Iraq, with more than 1,000 staffers in 2006, had only six fluent Arabic speakers.

In the run-up to the war, as Fred Kaplan reported, Bush was warned by Iraqi exiles that American forces "would have to tamp down the sectarian tensions that would certainly reignite between Sunnis and Shiites in the wake of Saddam’s toppling.

Bush looked at the exiles as if they were speaking Martian. They spent much of their remaining time, explaining to him that Iraq had two kinds of Arabs, whose quarrels dated back centuries. Clearly, he’d never heard about this before.

Few things are more frightening than ignorance in action, the German philosopher Goethe said. Bush made the same mistake American presidents made in Vietnam -- stumbling and bumbling arrogance and ignorance of the history and culture of the country the US was invading.

Those opposed to the US/UK intervention in Iraq are obliged to ask, "Would the country, or the region, or the world be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power?" Sure, the intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was wrong, but wmd's were only one reason for the invasion and occupation. On the 10th anniversary of the war, some argue that Iraq, the United States, and the world, would be better off if Saddam were still in power. Saddam's Sunni brethren are merging with opposition groups in Syria, and organizing in opposition to the central governments of both Syria and Iraq, the Wall Street Journal reports. To stop civil war and stabilize the country, the Iraqi prime minister may become a dictator like Saddam, many predict.

This may be shocking, but as someone who encountered everyday people in Russia -- bus drivers, clerks, even school teachers -- who longed for a leader like Stalin, it's not terribly surprising to me. Saddam idolized Stalin and modeled his regime on Stalin's, biographer Said K. Aburish said in an interview for a PBS Frontline broadcast in 2000.

"Stalin is his hero. (Like Saddam) Stalin came from a humble background. Stalin was brought up by his mother. Stalin used thugs. Stalin used the security service. Stalin hated his army. And so does Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein models himself after Stalin more than any other man in history."

Imagine if the US had invaded Russia, toppled Stalin and tried to establish democracy in Russia in the early 1950s. What a backlash that would have created. Some citizens favor a strong-man form of government, even if it's a dictatorship, because they value "law and order" -- security and stability -- above all else.

Unlike Stalin, Saddam had "no ideology whatsoever." He was "into realpolitik. He wanted to take Iraq into the 20th century. But if that meant eliminating 50 percent of the population of Iraq, he was willing to do it," Aburish observed.

The argument has special relevance because of what's happening in neighboring Syria. "Saddam was probably 20 times as bad as Assad in Syria," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a recent interview justifying the toppling of Saddam. "Just think (if Saddam) was trying to suppress an uprising in Iraq. Think of the consequences of leaving that regime in power."

If the US/UK had not intervened in Iraq, once the Arab Spring came, Saddam would have either slaughtered his people or there would have been a long, bloody war to topple Saddam (or his successor sons) like the war to topple Assad in Syria. In the first two years, more than 40,000 Syrians have died in civil war. The death toll in Iraq from a campaign to topple Saddam would probably have been far worse, many believe. And the United States, as well as the international community, would have faced enormous pressure to intervene in Saddam's Iraq, just as they do today in Assad's Syria.

Yet in all likelihood, Saddam would have survived the Arab spring, reporter Bobby Ghosh wrote for Time magazine, because of his ruthless brutality and willingness to restrict access to the outside world.

Well, you used to have an oppressive dictator who at least was a bulwark against Iranian power expanding westward. Now you have an increasingly authoritarian and abusive leader of Iraq who appears to be enabling Iranian arms transfers to Syria.

Nostalgia for Saddam can still be found in Iraq, especially in his hometown of Tikrit, Salam Faraj of Agence France reports. The country was relatively stable when he was in power, secular in outlook, and independent of Iranian influence, Tikrit residents say.

Iraqis still come to Saddam's hometown to pay homage, though his gravesite is now closed. "Most visitors said they recalled days under Hussein when their children could go to school without fear of improvised explosives on roadways and when the electricity stayed on far longer than it does these days," Aaron Davis reported for The Washington Post in 2011. “He was a dictator, but he was one dictator; now we have many,” said one Sunni.

Joost Hiltermann, who has studied the Iraq conflict for the International Crisis Group, said the increase in visitors to Hussein’s grave represents only a swath of Iraq’s population. “There are many Shias and Kurds who say, ‘The dictator is gone and we live more freely now.’ But Iraq is still an unhappy place,” Hiltermann said. “A significant part of the population is nostalgic for strong leadership, unhappy about the endemic instability, and fears growing influence by Iran and senses that Iraq as a regional power is weakened.”

In Baghdad, residents recalled that they had full electricity under Saddam, and the regime ran a substantial food-for-the-poor program.

Banen Al-Sheemary, an Iraqi-American student at the University of Michigan, asked her parents what Iraq was like in their youth, during Saddam's early reign. She blogs:

During the seventies and eighties, Iraq was a powerhouse of academia, with a thriving economy. In 1979, an Iraqi dinar was equal to $3.20. Nowadays, an Iraqi dinar is practically worthless. Saddam’s effort to lead in the Arab world led to many positive reforms, especially for women. My mother enjoyed free transportation to work as required by the state and a six month fully paid maternity leave. Despite his cruel methods of subjugation and obsession with monopolizing and maintaining power, his push to make Iraq the leader of the Arab world, meant economic and social reform.

It was after the first Gulf War, particularly with international sanctions against Saddam's regime, that life in Iraq deteriorated greatly for Banen's parents, and they fled the country for the US.

During Saddam's reign, Iraq had about 1.5 million practicing Christians. But after the American invasion, Christians were targeted as an "alien and infidel minority supposedly in league with the West," David Blair reported for the (UK) Telegraph. About 85 percent of Christians fled the country, leaving only about 200,000 struggling to survive. While Shia and Sunni clerics have issued a rare joint fatwa forbidding attacks on religious minorities, Christians are still under a lot of pressure in Iraq.

Some Sunnis, particularly in places like Fallujah, say Saddam's government treated them more fairly than the current Shia-led government. The government of Nouri Al Maliki is increasingly allied with the Shiites and Iran. The Sunni vice president was arrested on terrorism charges, and the Sunni deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, told the BBC's Robin Lustig that "he regards Mr Maliki as a worse dictator than Saddam Hussein."

Yes, Saddam ruled by autocracy, and fear if not terror -- those who did not obey Saddam were ruthlessly oppressed, tortured or killed. One cannot really say that life was better under Saddam until one reads the full litany of the crimes he committed, as exposed in his trial. A PBS Frontline documentary, "The Survival of Saddam," aired in 2000 and explored the secrets of his life and leadership.

In the run-up to both the first Gulf War and the American war in Iraq, U.S. propagandists portrayed Saddam as either stupid or crazy, a megalomaniac as dangerous as Adolph Hitler. But in reviewing the archives of Saddam's reign, historians are coming to a different conclusion. Mark Stout of Johns Hopkins University and co-editor of The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime 1978-2001, told reporter Omar Karmi that Saddam was "a very capable leader."

"He was neither stupid nor crazy. He was very good at what he did, which was to survive in a cut-throat political environment."

If Iraq cannot establish stability, another totalitarian like Saddam may be in its future.

Which begs a difficult question:

Ten years after Assad goes, might there be Syrians and international historians who argue that Syria was better off when he was in power?

Former President Bill Clinton on Dave Letterman Show in 2002 sure bought into the faulty intelligence on Iraq, and greatly under-estimated the ease of toppling Saddam: “[Saddam] is a threat. He’s a murderer and a thug. There’s no doubt we can do this. We’re stronger; he’s weaker. You’re looking at a couple weeks of bombing and then I’d be astonished if this campaign took more than a week. Astonished.” (Hat tip, AndrewSullivan.com, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion.)

"If he's got these stocks of chemical and biological weapons, and if he knows he's toast, don't you think he'll use what he can and give away what he can't to people who'll be using them on us for years to come so he can have the last laugh...."

Mr. Clinton clearly supports his successor.

"I think the President is doing the right thing to go to the United Nations, to ask them to do something and I hope that whatever we do - I think we need to turn up the heat, I think it's just a mistake to walk away from this," said Mr. Clinton.

But he finds the idea of the U.S. acting against Iraq - with only British support – problematic. Even President Bush has expressed such reservations.

Mr. Clinton told Letterman that - for now - the next step should probably be more weapons inspections.

"I wouldn't be opposed to trying these inspections one more time because I know that they did work even when he was trying to undermine us, we kept getting tons of stuff out of there," he said.

Clinton also wrote an op-ed for the (UK) Guardian urging Britons to trust Prime Minister Tony Blair's judgment in favor of war. In 2004, he told Time magazine that "I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over." President Bush, he said, "did the right thing" on Iraq. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out Clinton's "dishonesty slide" on Iraq when he thought he could help Hillary's 2008 campaign.

Many Democrats still bitterly believe that a "stolen election" in 2000 -- Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million -- and that an illegitimate leader and stupid George W. Bush caused America to stumble into a disastrous war in Iraq. Yes, it's true that Gore presciently warned against the invasion in 2002, and as president may not have pulled the trigger on Iraq. But Gore's vice president, Joe Lieberman, his national security advisor Leon Fuerth and former President Clinton were in favor of removing Saddam and under-estimated the difficulty of governing Iraq afterwards. "Given the changed climate produced by Sept. 11, 2001, we should aim from the beginning to destroy the Iraqi regime, root and branch," Fuerth wrote in November, 2001.

Kenneth Pollack, a member of Mr. Clinton’s National Security Council staff, would later write in 2002 that it was a question of “not whether but when” the U.S. would invade Iraq. He wrote that the threat presented by Saddam was “no less pressing than those we faced in 1941.”...We owe it to history—and, more important, to all those who died—to recognize that this wasn’t Bush’s war, it was America’s war.

Clinton was more popular than Gore in 2000, and if he were constitutionally allowed to run for a third term, he probably would have handily beaten Bush. Ironically, his third term -- or Gore's first term -- could have ended disastrously, with a quagmire in Iraq and Democrats deeply divided over that quagmire, not unlike what Lyndon Johnson faced on Vietnam in 1968.

An American correspondent emails me: "I don't need to read books to know how they (the Iraqis) live.....I suspect they lead a miserable existence. And, looking at photos of their life before 2003 they led a miserable existence then. All you have to do is look at their ramshackle houses and dirty streets to know that. And, they were hungry under Saddam...imagine they are hungry now."

To the contrary, Erbil, Iraq has lots of millionaires, rapid modernization and great beauty. The locals aspire to transform it into "the next Dubai or Istanbul." Click.

Erbil has been named the 2013 Tourism Capital by the Arab Council of Tourism. By 2014, Erbil expects to have four million tourists.

Perhaps so, but they need to get a better PR person....the only photos I've seen is narrow streets, brown adobe type houses, dirty streets.......I have to draw my conclusion with what the press presents since I have not been there and have no desire to go.

They do need better PR, and recognize that they do. However, I doubt a big PR campaign will change the point of view of those who pays so little attention to Iraq news in particular or foreign news in general. They just don't want to hear about Iraq these days. That's probably because Americans feel rejected by the Iraqis, my correspondent contends.

Ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, the country shows some positive economic news on which to build:

Iraq's oil industry has come back in a big way, April Yee reports in The (UAE) National newspaper. "In a relatively short time it has lured the world's biggest oil companies to redevelop its fields, topped its pre-war peak pumping levels and become the second-top producer in Opec."

Iraq's business tourism industry is growing rapidly, from 237,000 in 2011 -- 30,000 a year -- to a projected 350,000 in 2015. Major international hotel chains, including Marriott, Hilton, and Intercontinental, are opening hotels in Iraqi cities within the next two years, mainly in the stable northern region of Kurdistan.

Iraqis are becoming tech-savvy. "Mobile penetration is at 83 per cent in Iraq. Internet penetration, while still low, is growing and satellite channels number in their hundreds," The (UAE) National newspaper reports. About one-quarter of the population has easy access to a computer, 10 percent of the population uses the Internet, and Facebook is growing wildly, connecting young people to a global social network. Facebook is the most visited website in Iraq, according to web measurement company Alexa.

International fund managers "show very optimistic data for Iraqi GDP growth and massive share-price upside" on the Iraqi stock exchange, James Doran reports in The (UAE) National newspaper. The Iraq stock exchange has grown from 15 companies participating in 2004 to 88 companies participating in 2013, The combined market capitalization of listed companies in the exchange has grown five to seven times since the exchange opened in 1997.

The American decision to invade Iraq in 2003 will be debated for decades. From afar, it still looks like a catastrophe, with frequent news of suicide bombings, sectarian strife, and undependable electricity. But if you visit the thriving oil-rich Iraq city of Irbil, you'd probably say the decision was a good one. An economic boom fueled by oil production is helping the northern Kurdish region to develop rapidly, making it prosperous as well as stable. Sympathy for America runs strong in the Kurdish region, the AP reports, on the 10th anniversary of the American invasion:

Rebaz Zedbagi, a partner in the Senk Group, a road construction and real estate investment company with an annual turnover of $100 million, said his success would have been unthinkable without the war. The 28-year-old said he won't do business in the rest of Iraq, citing bureaucracy and frequent attacks by insurgents, but said opportunities in the relatively stable Kurdish region are boundless.

"I believe Kurdistan is like a baby tiger," said Zedbagi, sipping a latte in a Western-style espresso bar in the Family Mall, Irbil's largest shopping center. "I believe it will be very powerful in the Middle East."

Iraq's overall economy is improving significantly. It is reliably and methodically producing oil again. In 2012, Iraq produced more oil than in any year since the first Gulf War. By some estimates, Iraq will soon overtake Russia as the world’s number-two oil exporter. (Source.)

In Abu Dhabi, I met an educator from an elite private school in Irbil who reported on the city's remarkable progress over the last decade. I also spoke with an American army veteran who talked about how much he loves the Iraqi people, and how industrious they are. In Turkey, I met businessmen who invited me to accompany them on one of their frequent trips to northern Iraq. As an American, I demurred, thinking it unsafe. But now I wonder if I was too influenced by sensationalistic media reports. All of these encounters have challenged my negative preconceptions of Iraq.

So you're saying America's mission in Iraq has not been a complete catastrophe?

Not completely. The long-oppressed Kurds in the north, representing about one-fifth of the population, saw the weakness of the central government as their opportunity to create a long dreamed of semi-independent Kurdish state, a wealthy one with oil. They are actually doing better than they were under Saddam and have taken ownership of their own provincial government. In that sense, they are grateful to the Americans.

Perhaps the American venture will be considered one-third successful if Kurdistan's "liberation" holds. But there are serious dangers because the central government wants much more of the massive oil revenues the Kurds are producing, so they may fall into civil war with Baghdad.

The question is how the Kurdish region, which spans from Iraq to Northern Syria and Southern Turkey, will develop, and how much autonomy it can grasp. Today's Zaman columnist GÖKHAN BACIK classifies this area as a "transnational border." He observes:

"The Syrian-Turkish border has failed. No matter how the Syrian crisis ends up, that border will become transnational in practice. The Kurds who live on its southern and northern flanks will not reinstate it. So, how will Ankara rule its Kurdish people who are in a transnational relationship with other groups in another country? There is now one simple fact: Turkey should be seeking harmony in its policy towards its own Kurds and Syrian Kurds under the control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Discord will draw backfire from both quarters."

Part of my skepticism about the government's self-serving penchant for secrecy is because I worked for Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) during the debate over Iraq's so-called "weapons of mass destruction." As you know, "WMDs" provided the Bush administration's primary rationale for the war. Graham, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did what few other senators did: read all the intelligence reports on Iraq. He did not find the case for war with Iraq persuasive. The Bush administration manipulated the public by boiling down a 90-page secret intelligence report into 25 pages, giving only the case for WMDs, and for war. As Graham noted in this Washington Post op-ed, by law he was muzzled -- he could not release or quote from secret documents that doubted Iran's WMDs. Before the war in Iraq, Congress did not have a full and fair debate over whether it made sense. The nation rushed blindly into war without thinking it through, and we have paid the price in lives and treasure since. If Wikileaks had been around back in 2002, might war in Iraq have been avoided? Or at least, might American government officials have debated the run-up to war more fully?

Just thınk ıf our "ıntelligence" on Iraq had been made publıc before the war rather than trustıng blındly ın the CIA and Bush administration. It could have been pointed out that much of our so-called ıntellıgence about WMDs was comıng from aggrieved ex-pats with an ax to grind and Ahmed Chalabi, the ambitious former minister of oil who, with the assistance of a lobbying powerhouse, hoped to be ınstalled as presıdent of Iraq by the US. That ıs the true scandal.

Certainly, Wikileaks has performed a valuable public service by leaking battlefield reports in Iraq and Afghanistan, including horrific video of a US helicopter attacked that killed at least 11 US citizens. The American public has a right to know how it is being represented abroad.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers regarding the Vietnam War, observed in 2008: "Many, if not most, covert operations deserve to be disclosed by a free press. They are often covert not only because they are illegal but because they are wildly ill-conceived and reckless. "Sensitive" and "covert" are often synonyms for "half-assed," "idiotic," and "dangerous to national security," as well as "criminal."

Steven Kinzer in Today's Zaman: “Turkey can play a great role in the world, particularly in the Islamic world as a model of how democracy and Islamic tradition and capitalism can all coexist...In order to be a good model, though, Turkey has to complete its own democratic transition..." Kinzer is the author of “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America's Future.” He suggests that Turkey and Iran will make good partners for the U.S. "Their societies have values that are compatible with American values. They are countries that spent a hundred years [striving for] democracy and understand what democracy, freedom and civil society are about."

Corrupt autocracies are crumbling in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and a half-dozen other states of the Middle East, Jackson Diehl reports in the Washington Post. In Egypt, a grassroots pro-democracy movement has hundreds of thousands of supporters. The question is what happens when 81-year-old dictator Hosni Mubarak passes from the scene. It may not be a good sign that Washington appears to be cutting funds for democratic development in Egypt. President Bush put heavy pressure on Mubarak to allow more democracy, through the funding of democratic groups. The danger, of course, is that U.S. funding for "democratic groups" (NGOs) may be seen as interference in domestic politics, and ultimately a backlash in which the U.S. is blamed for domestic turmoil. The last thing the U.S. needs is to be seen as a "Great Satan" in Egypt.

Newsweek recently noted that George W.
Bush's reputation could be redeemed if Iraq turns out far better than
predicted: "Iraq could still turn out to be an extraordinary model for
the Arab world. Its people are negotiating their differences for the
most part peacefully; its politics is becoming more pluralistic and
democratic; its press is free; its provinces have autonomy; its focus
has shifted to business and wealth creation, not religion and jihad.
The Obama administration has a window of opportunity to cement these
gains in 2010."

A reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog sums up well what's at stake: "If something reasonably decent and democratizing can emerge in Iraq -- and have the resources of that oil state -- and something decent and democratizing can emerge in Iran -- and have the resources of that oil state -- it will fundamentally tip the whole Arab-Muslim world. Instead of oil funding the worst Sunni Arab dictator and the worst Shiite theocrats, oil -- for the first time in the modern history of the Middle East -- will funding reasonably decent, freely-elected, modernizers in Iraq and Iran. It would turn that world upside down."